European consortium involving Barclays and other organizations test digital ID for opening a bank account

11 July 2017

An association of private organizations and public institutions involving HSBC, Barclays, the UK Government Digital Service, French mobile operator Orange, a French specialist in security solutions OT-Morpho and the Open Identity Exchange (OIX UK), are participating in the pilot test of the European regulation on digital identification and trust services for transaction purposes eIDAS in the experiment aimed at using digital identity verification for banking services.

During the pilot test the association of these institutions united into the Consortium will be checking the use of a French citizen’s national digital identity for subscribing for a bank account with a UK institution.

For these purposes the Consortium will create a pilot sample on the basis of the Mobile Connect protocol to allow customers to request for a digital ID verified through the eIDAS. Mobile Connect, in its turn, is a standard developed on the basis of the OpenID Connect/OAuth2.

During the experiment Orange will be developing the services to enable the establishment of a digital identity for a citizen from France via the Mobile Connect service, and OT-Morpho will create dedicated platform for the process of identity verification.

Trista Sun speaking for HSBC notes that customers today experience inconvenience due to the need to undergo cumbersome process of paper identification when opening a bank account, and the implementation of the digital IDs based on the trusted standards and protocols has a huge potential for identity authentication revolution.